Backup strategy for developer-focused Apple environments?

We're just trying to bring our Macs into the fold here. My original plan was to use Backup Exec's Mac agent. Then I found out that the agent doesn't support 10.9, or even 10.8. So if you're keeping the OS up-to-date, that's out. I've heard legend tell that the next SP will get it up to speed, but I'm not holding my breath.

It has been a few years, but Retrospect used to be the gold (and only) standard for Mac backup. Install the agent and you could set a schedule so the Macs would back up once connected to the network. I don't have recent experience with it, though it did work via VPN many moons ago. You'd then want to have it save the backup sets to storage that you would sweep into your existing backup environment.

If you get a Mac Mini with OS X Server, you can redirect Time Machine on the laptops to the network, then sweep that connection up with another disk backup tool. I don't know if there's any granularity to Time Machine, though -- I believe it grabs the entire disk, or nothing.

I know you mentioned cloud may not be an option, but if that is because of the VMs (which are now out of scope?), then perhaps that makes your CrashPlan/BackBlaze/Carbonite options more palatable.

If you do want to bring the VMs in scope, you could install a Windows-based agent in the VM, and treat that as you would anything else.

I used to use CrashPlan at a previous job to back up a couple of hundred Mac laptops, a few Windows VMs, and even a couple of Linux servers.

They have a cloud based solution, but we used the on-premise server (I think they've since renamed it to CrashPlan ProE) and it was rock solid.

I liked it enough that I use their cloud consumer solution to back up all my personal Macs.

re: Mac filesystem attributes mentioned in another answer - OS X is fully supported on CrashPlan and we never had any issues restoring Mac resource forks. You can run the server on OSX, but we ran ours on a Dell running Ubuntu.

re: Pricing - the seats are per-computer, not per-user, so if a user has a laptop and a desktop, that counts as two seats which seems reasonable. The seat price was on the low end of the range of different products we looked at.

CP has typical enterprise features as far as being able to configure how long to keep backups for (We kept hourly changes for a couple weeks, dailies for a month, then weekly for six months and monthly after that), and you can set up different organizations that have different settings. Setting up our server to auth to our LDAP took about 5 minutes, I recall being shocked at how quickly we got everything set up.

Acronis supports Macs and a centralized backup server. Symantec also supports Macs and has a centralized appliance. There's also Retrospect, a long-time established Mac backup package that also appears to support a local backup server. I'm sure there are more. (I've intentionally excluded cloud services.)

Of course, the way we're using Acronis (for Windows!) qualifies more as business continuity rather than disaster recovery. We're using it for the users who have SSDs; when the SSDs inevitably die, Acronis gets them back up and working fast. The actual DR data is all server data and is handled differently based on whether it's client data or internal data.

You didn't explicitly state whether you were looking for business continuity answers or disaster recovery answers, but I've answered more along the lines of continuity. On the other hand, if the building burns down, perhaps your devs will have their laptops with them, so continuity is probably more of what you need.

[Edit]

I had intentionally excluded Crashplan due to the "no cloud" restriction, despite liking the home version a lot. Crashplan and Acronis are different use cases, though; Acronis does actual imaging, and Crashplan is data only (by default, the user's home directory only). Acronis is scheduled, and Crashplan is continuous (whenever the storage is available).

In our particular environment, developers are allowed to customize their machines in whatever way is most efficient for them, so they need an image level backup so they can get back up and running fast in case of emergency. If your devs use their machines the same way, they probably need an image-level backup, too. One more thing to look at in the product offerings, alas. (It looks like Acronis' Mac imaging is providing a central repository for Time Machine, but I could be misreading.)

(I've heard of home users telling Crashplan to back up their entire hard drive, including the Windows directory, but they're doing it wrong, alas, because restores would probably be wading into unsupported territory. It's all about backing up data.)

I use Backblaze for many of my clients and on all of my machines (well, all the Win and OSX anyway - no support for anything else)- I can recommend them highly. The downsides are that the inital backup can take a while and it can be cumbersome to do a complete restore (they will overnight a drive for something like $200, but it can take time to prepare it), but it's completely automatic and very lightweight. It works well on Macs and Windows machines. (I also use acronis locally for a Windows machine that I like to abuse, never used their mac products). Backblaze also supports versioning, local encryption (i.e. they don't have your keys), and works from any internet connection, great for laptops.

CrashPlan is more expensive for business versions but they do have the advantage that you can seed your initial backup by sending them a drive.

I have never had a positive experience with Backup Exec (or Symantec anything at all), or Time Machine with anything more than a few machines.